Kofax, the worlds largest information capture vendor, today announced the successful results of an installation of its Ascent Capture, VirtualReScan (VRS) and Ascent Xtrata technology at Portugal Telecom Communications (PT Communications). The overall solution for PT Communications optimizes the processing of thousands of customer-related documents, including multi-page contracts and related legal documents that are handled daily, and helps the firm meet regulatory compliance requirements mandated by the Portuguese government.

PT Comunicaes (PT Communications), a wholly owned subsidiary of Portugal Telecom Group, has the largest telecommunications infrastructure in Portugal and manages more than four million private telephone connections. Kofax Ascent Capture, VRS and Ascent Xtrata were implemented as part of an information capture system designed to speed the processing of more than 40,000 customer contracts and legal documents that PT Communications employees handle daily. In addition, the information capture system was established by the firm to help prepare and maintain accurate financial records for regular audits performed by the Telecom Regulatory Agency, the governing federal telecommunications organization in Portugal.

PT Comunicaes need to process a high volume of documents accurately within a strict timeframe demonstrates how organizations are leveraging information capture to enable more efficient business-critical processes, said Anthony Macciola, vice president of product marketing at Kofax. Through our technology, large organizations -- especially those in paper-intensive industries such as telecommunications -- are able to streamline their business processes, increase operational efficiency, and grow their level of customer service.

Prior to the Kofax information capture system, no automated validation of documents existed and manual processing techniques were causing a backlog of unprocessed data. With Kofax technology, the efficiency of document processing has been greatly improved to the point that the average three- or four-minute document processing time now only takes 15 to 20 seconds per document.

Prior to implementing an information capture system, it would have taken 170 staff to process our current throughput of 40,000 documents per day, due to input errors that would have to be manually rectified, said Carlos Amorim, knowledge management consultant at PT-SI. Kofax technology has enabled us to complete the same task with only 25 people, while nearly doubling our document processing capacity. We expect that we will see a significant return on our investment within the first year alone.

In addition to implementing a system that would reduce the amount of staff personnel required to process large amounts of data, PT Communications needed a sophisticated means of delivering data to a database that would enable stored documents to be reviewed at a later time, then re-classified or re-routed should the need arise. To help implement a versatile information capture system capable of such requirements, PT Communications contacted Portugal Telecom Systems Integration (PT-SI), a Kofax Certified Solution Provider (CSP) and advanced solution integrator of both telecommunications and information technology solutions. After a thorough pilot project involving 2 other competitors capture solutions, PT-SI chose to implement Kofaxs Ascent Capture platform, VRS and Ascent Xtrata, along with three Bell+Howell Copyscan 8100 Spectrum scanners, based on their ability to handle different types of unstructured documents and process large volumes of documents.

PT Communications receives thousands of documents per day, both in paper and digital format, so we designed and built a robust information capture system that could process documents regardless of the format or condition in which they were received, said Carlos Amorim, The indexing and validation capabilities of the Ascent platform, VRS and Ascent Xtrata enhanced processing accuracy, seamlessly integrated into PT Communications system, and improved the overall efficiency of their operations.

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